Hitler may have "unwittingly married a Jew" shortly before he committed
suicide, a television programme has claimed, after analysing DNA from Eva
Braun's hairbrush

Hitler may have “unwittingly married a Jew” hours before his suicide, a television documentary has claimed, after analysis of Eva Braun’s hairbrush found she may have had Jewish ancestry.

A study of hair samples found in Braun’s hairbrush at Hitler’s Alpine retreat are said to show a genetic sequence strongly associated with the Ashkenazi Jews, which she is likely to have been unaware of.

The discovery, by scientists working for Channel 4’s Dead Famous DNA, suggests the Nazi dictator could have “married a Jew” without realising it, before he committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in 1945.

The claim is the latest in a series of “discoveries” by the programme, which has also drawn conclusions about the cause of Elvis’ death, the size of Napoleon’s manhood and claimed Charles Dickens suffered from Crohn’s disease.

The latest investigation, to be broadcast on Wednesday, April 9, uses a sample of hair from Braun’s monogrammed brush, which was discovered by an American army intelligence officer at the end of the Second World War.

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Paul Baer, a German-born Jew whose mother and sisters were taken to concentration camps, kept a selection of items from Braun’s apartment, including several Nazi ceremonial daggers, a human skull and a cosmetics case with the initials E.B.

His son Alan has now donated the hair for investigation, in the hopes of contributing to historical and scientific understanding.

A spokesman for the television programme said the hair collected from the brush came from “someone who could have had Jewish ancestry”.

He added the “unexpected and extraordinary discovery” showed a specific sequence within mitochondrial DNA belonging to haplogroup N1b1, which is strongly associated with Ashkenazi Jews.

Despite Hitler conducting research into Braun’s background, it is unlikely any link with Judaism would have been found; not least because many Ashkenazi Jews in Germany are known to have converted to Catholicism.

Programme-makers said they had attempted to obtain DNA evidence from two of Braun’s surviving descendents, to confirm the hair on the brush did belong to her, but have not been successful.

“This is a thought-provoking outcome - I never dreamt that I would find such a potentially extraordinary and profound result,” says Mark Evans, the programme’s presenter. “Racism and fascism – ideas that one racial group is superior to another – made a mockery of by studying dead famous DNA.”